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efforts to produce an edition of the Bible in its original languages, a project that had not
been seriously pursued since Jerome’s translation work in the 4 th century. 103 As Luther
imagined it, the true meaning of Scripture would no doubt shine forth from a New
Testament freed of the Latin accretions that encrusted the Vulgate text and restored to its
original Greek. Luther participated in the humanists’ project by translating the Bible into
German from Erasmus’ Greek edition (completed in 1534), rather than from the Latin
vulgate as previous translators had done. 104 Furthermore, Luther polemicized against the
four-fold method, arguing that this method generated arbitrary allegorical meanings that
strayed too far from the intent of the text, and allowed human invention to take
precedence over divine revelation. He did allow that Scripture occasionally used
metaphors, but he restricted metaphorical interpretation to cases where the Bible itself
signalled that it was using metaphor: Christ’s parables, for instance, were not meant to be
read literally, but were acceptable since the text itself provided the key to solving the
metaphor. 105
Luther distinguished between the Gospel (God’s single, unified message of
salvation for humankind) and Scripture (its written relic), which meant that no other
books or commentaries were, in theory at least, necessary since “das Euangeli selbs
103 Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures (New York: Viking, 2005), 169.
104 Jaroslav Pelikan, Valerie Hotchkiss and David Price, The Reformation of the Bible: The Bible of the
Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 51. Luther’s return to the Greek text as the
authoritative one was the cause of much controversy, prompting him to defend his translation in his
Sendbrief von Dolmetschen. Ibid, 13-17. Later, in the first phase of the Council of Trent (1545-1547), the
Roman church’s systematic, institution-wide response to the Protestant schism, affirmed that the Vulgate
was the authoritative version of the Bible, rather than the original Greek or Hebrew texts. Irena Backus,
Guy Bedouelle, Robert E. Shillenn and R. Gerald Hobbs, "Bible," The Oxford Encyclopedia of the
Reformation (e-reference edition), ed. Hans J. Hillebrand, Oxford University Press, 2005, www.oxfordreformation.com/entry?entry=t172e0145.s0002.
105 Scott H. Hendrix, "Luther Against the Background of the History of Biblical Interpretation,"
Interpretation 37, no. 3 (1983): 229-231. Hendrix clarifies that, of course, medieval exegetes did not ignore
the literal and historical sense, nor did Luther abandon allegory altogether, but rather that Luther had an
“aversion to excessive allegorizing and...[a] willingness to find the legitimate meaning in the grammatical
and historical analysis of the text.” (234)
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